Read The Rattlesnake Season Online
Authors: Larry D. Sweazy
The Rattlesnake Season (12 page)
As he rolled, balancing the carbine as best he could, he fired off two rounds from the Peacemaker.
The unseen shooter returned fire.
Josiah’s shots had missed. He pulled the trigger three more times, wishing he trusted the new weapon enough to load it fully.
The need to reload the Peacemaker came a second sooner than it should have—he wasn’t sure if he’d hit his unseen target. No shots were immediately returned, so he took another deep breath, half-cocked the gun, and opened the loading gate.
He popped in a bullet, skipped the next chamber, loaded the rest, closed the gate, drew the hammer to full cock, and waited for a noise, a shot, anything that would give him a clue about where to shoot.
Nothing came. At least nothing close. Camp was another story.
There was more yelling, still plenty of shots being peppered about.
Josiah was pinned in, at least for the moment.
He heard Sam Willis call out to Vi McClure. More shots followed, bright sunny orange blasts of light that looked like fireflies in the gray dawn, the noise deafening, overtaking Vi McClure’s response. If he had one.
The carbine already had a cartridge chambered home. It had been in the ready position since Josiah took watch. He was glad he wouldn’t have to load the Sharps, glad that the loud lever action wouldn’t give up his spot off the trail. A repeater sure would have been preferable at the moment.
He couldn’t wait there forever, not knowing what had happened to the shooter or who it was who had spotted him. Slowly, he began to ease down the trail again, slinking on crouched knees behind the rocks and boulders toward the camp, the carbine in one hand, the Peacemaker in the other.
His ankle slid down a hole.
He was surprised he didn’t pull out a dangling rattlesnake as he moved on, trying not to overreact. It would be his luck to get snakebit while there was an attack on his fellow Rangers.
Morning was coming on fast.
The horizon was now fully lit with the rising sun. Gray had burned white. Soon the white would bloom a fragile blue, filling the sky with color and cotton-ball clouds, and there would be no hiding in the dark—either for himself or the attackers. Josiah figured the shooting would be over by then.
The smell of gunpowder mixed with the waning campfire smoke, a blend of carbons that burned Josiah’s nose and throat. The coming day had arrived in the blink of an eye, and change had arrived at the pull of a trigger, and like so many days in the past, it was likely to be stained with blood and death.
He could see the trail in front of him, and every few feet he would stop, peer around a corner, or over the top of a rock, to see if he could see who had had him in his sights.
It wasn’t until he was nearly to the entrance of the camp that he discovered one of his own shots had found its target . . . and there was one less shooter to concern himself about.
A man Josiah had never seen before lay propped back against a huge rock, a carbine on both sides of him. He had been outgunned and felt extremely lucky to be alive at the moment.
It looked like the man was not much older than Scrap Elliot. A patch of soft stubble was hardly visible on his chin, and his hands looked like they had never seen a bit of farm work. A kid. He had shot a kid. Albeit unknown to him. He could feel a load of bile rising in his throat.
Josiah knew he had only been protecting himself. But killing never came easy to him.
This kid’s eyes were glazed, vacant, and his shirt soaked with fresh blood.
Mixed with the shooting and smoke, the air now held the familiar smell of blood. The flies that feasted on the bounty of man’s madness would not be far behind. Josiah shivered at the thought. Pushed away ghost images that were not welcome, but were persistent and uncontrollable, regardless of his effort.
It looked like the bullet had caught the shooter in the throat just right. Depending on how he looked at it, Josiah’s aim was a lucky shot or a ricochet. Regardless, the kid was dead.
He hesitated for a second, stared at the dead man, and realized there was nothing he could do—and he wasn’t sure that the man would have deserved it even if he could—then he made a beeline to the camp, still skirting the trail, not taking any more undue chances but a little more confident in his movements.
He had no idea how many more men were among the attackers . . . or what their motive was. Though it wasn’t hard to figure out that the men were after Charlie Langdon’s freedom.
Josiah glanced back over his shoulder and thought the dead kid had gotten the short end of the stick.
A devil like Charlie Langdon wasn’t worth losing your life over as far as Josiah was concerned. No man was worth that, but it never ceased to amaze Josiah what one outlaw would do for another.
The shouting and shooting calmed. Then stopped suddenly. There were a few muffled voices, nothing that he could decipher, but any urgency seemed to be gone—vanished like a tornado rising back into the smoky sky.
Josiah froze in his tracks as he came to the largest of all the boulders at the entrance to the camp, the spot Captain Fikes had chosen to spend the night at.
Josiah was about fifty feet from the fire Vi McClure had cooked supper over.
There was no one to be seen. He was shielded but could see nearly everything. Charlie was gone from his bed on the ground, the blankets left behind in a bundle that looked more like a rat’s nest than a bedroll. And no one was in the camp.
A quick glance upward told him Clipper and the other Rangers’ horses were still corralled. Josiah was glad of that.
When he looked back to the camp, Scrap Elliot appeared, edging around the cliff face, his head down, his gun pointed to the ground, barely in his grasp. The kid was in a stupor it seemed. Not quite staggering, but listless, like he was lost.
Josiah knew the look. It was a good bet that the kid had killed, or at least shot, his first man. He edged out from his hiding place.
Scrap jerked and started, and looked up quickly, aimlessly raising his gun at Josiah.
“Oh,” he said. “Wolfe, it’s just you.” He hesitated, then let the gun fall back to his side. “They’re gone.”
For some reason Josiah wasn’t entirely relieved. The expression on Scrap’s face gave him no reason to be glad of anything. The kid’s skin was ashen, and he was damn near in tears once he realized it was Josiah coming at him and not an outlaw.
“What about Charlie?”
Scrap nodded. “Gone.”
“Damn it.”
“It’s the captain, Wolfe. He’s been shot pretty bad.”
“Where?”
Scrap pointed from where he’d come. “Up near the horses. Feders told me I was no help there, to get the hell out. That’s what I’m doing. Getting the hell out.” He reached out, propped his hand on the cliff face to steady himself, then slid down to his knees.
Josiah glanced up the trail, then hurried over to Scrap. There was a dribble of blood on his sleeve, growing larger. “You’ve been shot, too.”
“It’s a graze. I’ll be all right.”
Sure, Josiah thought. Sure you will. He tore open the sleeve to see the wound for himself. Scrap offered no resistance. The kid was right. It was a graze, but the bleeding needed to be stopped.
The closest cloth was a shirt next to the bedroll Charlie Langdon had been using. Josiah jumped up to grab the shirt, but stopped when he saw the metal bracelets that had bound Charlie’s wrists, lying on the ground, popped open like they had never been locked in the first place.
Josiah left Scrap to tend to himself and pressure the wound.
Captain Fikes was sprawled out on the ground about ten feet from where the horses were corralled. Someone, probably Feders, had covered Fikes with a blanket. His eyes were closed, but his chest rose and fell rapidly, like he was battling for each and every precious breath.
The wheeze coming out of the captain’s mouth was unmistakable . . . Death was approaching, growing closer with each attempt, even though the captain’s body was putting up a fight against the inevitable coming of darkness.
It was a hard thing for Josiah to see. Hiram Fikes was a man cast of iron, a warrior with more lives than any cat, and his death in the middle of nowhere, at the hands of unseen attackers, seemed so unlikely and surreal that Josiah could hardly believe what he was witnessing.
The sun had peaked over the horizon.
The gray dawn was just another bad memory, the quiet night before suspect, and accordingly, every action and word would be pored over, tossed and turned, in search of apparent failures, answers about what had occurred from shortly before the shooting began in the camp.
But as far as Josiah was concerned, now was not the time to go looking for blame.
A small cloud of rolling dust in the distance caught his attention.
Riders heading back toward San Antonio.
The dust was too thick, too small, too far in the distance, to make out any detail, how many horses, who they were—impossible to tell. But one thing was certain: Charlie Langdon was nowhere to be seen. He had escaped.
The small cloud quickly joined up with a larger cloud—a group that had been waiting, which struck Josiah as strange.
Pete Feders stared up at Josiah. He was crouched at the captain’s side, dabbing the wounded man’s dry lips with a wet handkerchief. In Feders’s eyes there was anger that bordered on rage. “No one heard your warning, Wolfe.”
“That’s because there wasn’t one. They came in around the cliff face, in the shadows. There’s no way I could have seen them. We needed two posts.”
“So you’re saying it’s the captain’s own fault he’s laying here dying?”
“I am not assigning blame, only answering your question. If the captain dies, we’ll all bear the burden of being present at his last breath,” Josiah said, averting his attention from Feders back to the captain.
Fikes looked like he was shrinking, the life vanishing from him before Josiah’s very eyes. Lily had withered away just like that—all too fast. One minute she was there, and the next gone.
“I’m going after them.”
Feders shook his head. “Willis is on their trail.”
“What about McClure?”
“He was the one that let Charlie loose.”
Josiah lowered his head and took a deep breath. “What the hell?” he whispered. “Are you sure? McClure seemed like a gentle man, one of us.”
“Elliot saw it with his own two eyes, probably saved us all from having our throats slit while we slept. Kid’s lucky to be alive.”
“The wound is little more than a knick, but he is a lucky one. I’m glad for that,” Josiah said, casting a glance down the trail at the camp. He could see Scrap, still propped against the rock, his eyes frozen into an angry, confused stare at McClure’s empty stack of dishes next to the fire.
“Him and Charlie must’ve had it all figured out.” Feders paused, chewed the corner of his lip in thought for a second before continuing. “Waited until his gang was on us. They came from the inside out. Guess that’s why you didn’t see anything moving around until it was too late.”
“How many of them where there?” Josiah’s question was flat. He was angry that he had been duped by Vi McClure. But it wasn’t only him. All of them had believed in the man.
“Hard to say. At least three.”
Josiah kicked the dirt with his boot, looked out over the valley, and saw Sam Willis riding full-out toward San Antonio. He was certain that Willis was no match for Charlie Langdon and his gang, but at least he’d keep on their trail. “Four. I shot one on my side of the camp.”
Feders wet the captain’s lips again. “I owe you an apology then.”
“No need for that now. We need to back up Willis.”
Feders nodded, and stared out at the lone rider in the valley. “Sam Willis has got a score to settle. We’ll catch up with him soon enough.”
“He trusted McClure,” Josiah said. “The Scot told me they’d known each other for a long time. Whatever made him turn on his friend must have been pretty powerful.”
“Turned on us, too. Called himself a Ranger. Rangers don’t kill Rangers.”
“How do we know Willis is telling the truth? That he’s not one of them, too?”
“He wounded McClure. Shot him in the back of the leg as he and Charlie jumped on their horses to flee.” Feders paused, gritted his teeth. “Like low-down cowards. Low-down damn cowards.”
Before Josiah could say anything else, Captain Fikes opened his eyes suddenly, but wasn’t able to focus them on anything in particular. His fingers curled under and he gasped again, this time more deeply than ever. His chest rose high up off the ground—his back was a perfect arch, holding for a long, long moment. The wheeze was loud and hard, like a heavy scratch at the door. And then there was silence, as the captain’s body heaved even harder and fell still on the ground.
Pete Feders waited a minute, leaned in to detect breathing, then closed the captain’s eyes when he was certain of death. “I’m going after them, Captain. You can count on that. Charlie Langdon and Vi McClure aren’t going to get away with this. If I have to track them to my own last day, I will. I promise you that,” he said, through clenched teeth.
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